Such persistent failure by macroeconomists deserves explanation. What do economists actually do? Are they scientists in search of general laws or are they actors governed by the rules
of their academic sub-fields? This lecture provides a range of evidence in support of the latter. The uncertainty of provisional findings nurtures a rational mimetism. Some economists
(financial mathematicians, for example) are trapped by powerful economic interests, and others tend to develop only specialized approaches rather than burrowing to the foundations of
their discipline. Last but not least, an unprecedented professionalization has generated excessive specialization, i.e., a quasi-anomy of the division of labor into sub-sub-disciplines.
Each field believes they have the answer - but no one is considering economic theory's overarching architecture.

Boyer, R.: The Present Crisis: A Trump for a Renewed Political Economy. In: Review of Political Economy 25(1), 1-38 (2013).

Robert Boyer presently is an Associate Researcher at the Institut des Amériques, Vanves, France. He was a Research Director
(Directeur de recherche) at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Professor (Directeur d’études) at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and has
worked at the Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications (CEPREMAP). His major fields are: institutional and historical macroeconomics, innovation and growth analysis, labor
markets and wage labor nexus, international comparisons of capitalisms, European integration, financial crises, and the history of economic doctrines and theories. Since the early 1970s,
he has been a contributor to the Regulation Theory that investigates the factors that shape the institutional and technological long-term evolutions of capitalist economies.